How to Be a Musician (Band with Narrator)

open your mind...
see the notes
imagine
can you hear the music? let yourself in

play it
sing it
dance it
live it
make it yours
are you done? no
layer it, measure by measure line

by
line
find more music
play all of it - all at once

~ Elizaveta Zheleznyakova

Program Notes

This work comes along with another work (“Tomorrow, We’re Still Together”) as a pair of commissions by Mrs. Danni Schmitt at the Roland Park Elementary/Middle School in Baltimore, Maryland. For this piece, Danni knew right away that she wanted to use the above text as an inspiration for this piece. The poem was written by one of Danni’s middle school students as a sort of instruction manual for the younger students as they began their own journeys into becoming band musicians. That poem is included in the work as a narration, helping to divide the piece into each of it’s major formal sections.